Agelah and the Powershot: Digital Possibilities for Alternate Ways of Knowing in Archaeology

Summary

Digital recording methods offer a range of new means of collecting, organizing, and presenting archaeological information, which lead to new ways of thinking about the past. Capitalizing on the intuitive design of digital technologies additionally creates the potential for communities whose voices have been missing from the archaeological record to contribute their perspectives. In this paper, I draw upon my experiences experimenting with multimedia recording strategies at Petra, Jordan and at Catalhoyuk, Turkey, in order to create opportunities for locally-hired site workers on these projects to participate in excavation documentation. The photographs they created, especially, reveal ways of understanding the linkages between modern and ancient peoples, places, and objects that diverge from the normally assumed boundaries and relationships captured in archaeological recording. The affordances of digital technologies articulates with the specific archaeological expertise of site workers and the unique interpretive approaches of nonspecialist communities and gives rise to transformative ways of seeing and knowing the archaeological record. I will also discuss the limitations of the intuitive character of digital technologies, examining how the knowledge required to master these tools can work to exclude particular voices, though in different ways than previous recording technologies have done in the past.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• Archaeological Epistemology in the Digital Age

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 16373